Posted
by
Zonk
on Saturday February 03, 2007 @08:30PM
from the we-who-are-about-to-become-obsolete-salute-you dept.

ApacheVE writes "Voodoo Extreme has up a story called Generation XP: Top 20 Games of the Last Generation. They call out some of the best games released in the Windows XP era, to mark the passing into the 'next generation' of PC gaming this past week. Some favorites include Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament 2004, Civilization IV, World of Warcraft and other titles that helped shape the era." Any titles you see missing from the list? The XP years were truly great, as far as PC titles went; how long do you think it will be before Vista has enough market penetration to make a difference in gaming?

Warcraft 3 and Starcraft run just fine on WINE, and from what I know, WoW works on Cedega. Games from ID Software usually have Linux binaries. NWN has a Linux binary, too. Try again, it might surprise you.

Sounds like a M$ fluff piece, what the hell did M$ or XP have to do with creating the top games. M$ stealing other peoples thunder yet again, trying to make itself look good as a result of the growing problems with vista, as well as, trying to reinforce the idea of the compulsory necessity of switching to vista.

Hmm... I think I've played three games on that list: Halo, Warcraft III and NWN. Halo was fun. The latter two were dropped within hours, since watching paint dry was more entertaining. Coincidentally, I think the reason was similar in both cases: when you've played the BG series with a party of six, and RTS games with armies of hundreds of units, somehow you+henchman or "armies" with only a handful of units just don't seem spectacular or varied enough as drop-in replacements. You could certainly have games

20) Rise of Nations - yeah, ok, this seems fair enough. It's a nice concept and still a fun game to play. I may even have moved it a little higher up the list. Graphics are dated quite badly now, so a sequel wouldn't go amiss.

19) Halo - w... t... f... - sure, the Xbox version was great, even if its own sequel does comprehensively out-shine it, but the PC version always felt like a nasty hack at best.

18) Rome: Total War - reasonable pick and probably in about the right place on the list. Very solid game.

17) Unreal Tournament 2004 - this made me go "hmm" at first, but on balance, I think I could live with this here. It was definitely the best iterration of the series. I'm not quite sure how TFA manages to claim the original is better.

16) Medal of Honour Allied Assault - I guess you have to include one of the WW2 shooters and I guess this one is the obvious candidate. If this were the only one on the list, I could have been perfectly happy. Unfortunately, if you look further down...

15) Neverwinter Nights - ooooh, tricky one. On the one hand, the game as released, straight out of box, is pretty damned poor, with an original campaign that falls waaaaay short of the usual Bioware standards. The sequel is massively better in this respect. However, I will grant you that, with two solid expansions and a huge mass of mods available, NWN has grown way beyond what originally came out of the box.

14) Max Payne 2 - Can be completed in about 4-6 hours by an average player and has no replay value. No thanks.

13) Command and Conquer: Generals - Oh god no. Command and Conquer with a slight graphical facelift, but none of the production values that made the very early installments in the series great. Gameplay that was outdated compared to other RTSes even at release.

12) Guild Wars - not played it, so can't really comment.

11) Civilisation IV - frankly, the Civ games have never done it for me. However, I will grant that they do seem to push the requisite buttons for an awful lot of people, so happy to let this one stand.

10) Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos - yeah, good pick. Probably the best of the small-scale RTSes from the XP era. I'm mystified as to why the article says the controls were tricky, though. They were basically the same as any other RTS around, if not slightly better due to the decent hotkeys system.

9) Doom 3: Yep, decent pick. I know a lot of people found fault with it, but this game scared the living shit out of me (at least for the first half of the game). I'd probably have put this in the bottom end of the list, though, given the lack of variety. I actually felt Quake 4 was better, so may just have substituted that altogether.

8) F.E.A.R: again, a decent pick just on account of atmosphere. Plus the graphics were beautiful and the AI probably the best we've seen in an fps.

7) Company of Heroes: Hmm... maybe. Personally, I'd have substituted Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War for this, though. They're basically the same game underneath but, particularly with the expansions, I find Dawn of War slightly deeper. Still, there's no denying that Company of Heroes is very, very pretty.

6) Battlefield 1942: Yes, I'd probably go along with this, on the proviso that all of the sequels and expansion packs are excluded. BF2 in particular was an utter crock.

5)Knights of the Old Republic: Yes, definitely. Proof that Lucas should have let Bioware write Episodes 1-3.

4) Call of Duty: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO. What the fuck is it with this game? Why the hell do it and its sequels continue to attact such plaudits. An inferior, dumbed down Medal of Honour clone which brought nothing new to the genre at all. On a related note, why do all these countless WW2 fpses only feature battles from the second half of WW2 which the Allies won (oh, and Pearl Harbour). I grow tired of the "inevitable march to victory" feel of these games and feel that it actually fails to do history justice.

Farcry started great, but then they introduced mutants and crappy indoor levels. Also, the plotline sucked a bit. It would have been so much better if they kept the whole game outside on that lovely island chain. I hope Crytek hire a decent script writer for Crysis.

I have to agree with your nomination of Dawn of War, though. wonderful game. Shame Dark Crusade is horribly unblanced - Nothing seems to be able to stop an attack move from a big mob of Necrons.

The 360 version has massive control related issues. The resolution is a huge problem.

And the kicker: Show Stopper Bugs.

How can you possibly state that the bugs present in the PC version are a bigger problem than those on the 360? With the 360, you hit one of those bugs, and your game is over. And there are a LOT of these bugs.

On the PC:a) patches. Patches fix bugs. Bugs go away. Gameplay gets better.b) console. Console fixes or allows one to work around bugs and carry on with your game.c) mods. Mods are what make Oblivion really shine.

You are the very first person I have run across that actually prefers the 360 version. That statement alone suggests I should take every game related statement of yours with a large dose of salt.

The PC version doesn't just have bugs, it has huge, system-crashing bugs. The kind of system crashing bugs that I've never actually seen any other game manage under xp. I've replicated these bugs myself, under common conditions, on two of my own PCs, neither of which have stability problems in any other games I've thrown at them. I don't actually know anybody from among my series of friends who actually has the PC version running stably for protracted periods.The 360 version... just works. There may be mino

Actually, there was one quest on the 360 version which, when completed, resulted in complete show-stopping CRASH of your Xbox 360. I don't recall it ever being an issue on the PC. That was the quest with the dog statue. The name escapes me.

Oblivion's overrated crap anyway. Who cares which is better? I know people will disagree, but I can't stand the games. Ever since big MMORPG's hit the scene I find games like Oblivion to utterly boring and empty. Something is just missing when you don't have a bunch of other human controlled players with which to interact (join up for missions, fight, even just simply chat with).

That said, I don't play MMORPGs anymore because they are huge time sinks and amazingly addictive at the same time.

19) Halo - w... t... f... - sure, the Xbox version was great, even if its own sequel does comprehensively out-shine it, but the PC version always felt like a nasty hack at best.

Agreed. Disaster on the pc until the hardware caught up, but still left a lot to be desierd.

17) Unreal Tournament 2004 - this made me go "hmm" at first, but on balance, I think I could live with this here. It was definitely the best iterration of the series. I'm not quite sure how TFA manages to claim the original is better.

(shooting from gameplay cell, to a "display/movie" cell...the attacking walkers while you are on top of a building).

Interesting... Not sure exactly what your complaint here is. Is it that you move from gameplay to watching the walkers attack? Lazy bastard, when I was on that building (if this is what I think it is), I grabbed a rocket launcher and took them down...

Half-Life 2: I'd move this much further down the list.... While it was undoubtedly fairly good in places, it lacked the atmosphere of Doom 3 and the scope of Far Cry.

Haven't played Far Cry, but Doom 3 for atmosphere? Maybe at first, but honestly, Doom 3 has the exact same atmosphere for the entire game. Whisperings, slowly going insane, hell always just around the corner... I mean, yeah, it's creepy, and yeah, the first hundred zombies jumping out of odd place

There's also the element of atmosphere it provides: If Gordon never talks, and you never leave the first-person perspective, you can go on believing that it's happening to you, not Gordon -- that you are Gordon Freeman.

I hear this all the time, but I'd prefer the main charactor speak because I am not going to be able to pretend a video game charactor is me. I am not a resistance fighter, a PhD, or whatever other traits a character might have (a video game about me would be rather boring) and adding "not s

I love your signature...Also, there is a counterargument beyond that: In Jak & Daxter, Jak never said a word, it was always Daxter making the odd comments and Jak making facial expressions mostly along the lines of "whatever". In Jak II, Daxter is pretty much the same, but Jak does speak, and his first words are not at all a disappointment.

Yet, one big difference is that Half-Life 2 is an FPS -- first person. Your logic is fine, but I don't even make it that conscious -- the "not speaking" is rarely mad

20) Rise of Nations - yeah, ok, this seems fair enough. It's a nice concept and still a fun game to play. I may even have moved it a little higher up the list. Graphics are dated quite badly now, so a sequel wouldn't go amiss.

Actually the sequel, Rise of Legends, has graphics entirely in 3D, and they're not bad, although I'm not so fond of the fantasy stuff. Glad this game made it to the list tho, it's my favourite RTS.

OK then, this would be my list for the top ten WinXP games, in alphabetical order. Judging from comments here, I think this list is fairly representative, though with a couple of extra contributions of my own --

Civ 4

Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind

Far Cry

FEAR

GTA 3 plus sequels

Half-Life 2 plus mods

KotOR 1

NWN 1 plus mods

ScummVM (OK, this one's kind of cheating)

UT2k4

(I made up a list for 11-20 as well, with things like Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Escape Velocity Nova, but I figured they were

These are the ones I know:17) Unreal Tournament 2004 -- ships with a working Linux installer. My brother has found an insane number of mods for this game, and was up to some 20 gigs of space for just that game and its mods before we both migrated away from that Linux install -- me to another computer, him to a new hard drive and Windows. Surprisingly, when I installed and fully patched the Linux version last week, it has a native 64-bit binary.

The PC version of Halo was a lot of fun. The controls were just like any other FPS and the graphics were on par with other games made in that same year. My friends and I enjoyed playing Halo after ut2k4 became a bore and, in my opinion, it has a lot of great multiplayer maps (Blood Glutch, Sidewinder, and Death Island to name a few). There were many game types and had a decent number of hacks/mods to make the game interesting for quite a long time. If this list came out a few years ago, I would be shock

"Maybe you're right. Maybe the XBox just sucks. "No he's wrong, the PC port sucks ass, the graphics (for some reason) played like crap (on a Geforce4 compared to the Xbox's Geforce2), the mouse control was incredibly slow even with acceleration and set to level 10, this combined with the overall boring gameplay (why were all of the levels identical within a "chapter"?) made a truely craptasic game.

Halo? A highly repetitive game that features midget aliens that ran around like toddlers on cocaine? A dark future where the elite special forces get issues crap guns by default? Sure, it was an exception FPS for consoles, but that has more to do with the high level of suck of FPSs on consoles.

Doom 3? A single trick pony, not that "sucks that in the future we'll forget how to attach lights to guns" is much of a pony to start with. It's gorgeous, but it's a crappy game. Game design has moved on since the original Doom.

It's not that there aren't better games. Where is Far Cry, which blew Halo's outdoor scenes away (It jumps the shark midway through, but there is still a lot of great gameplay)? How about Quake 4, which took Doom 3's amazing technology and coupled it with rock solid gameplay (and features the radical idea that a future military might issue its troops useful assault rifles!). NOLF2? Return to Castle Wolfenstein?

At least with doom 3 you got cool visuals, and they delivered what previous versions of doom delivered. I wasn't surprised - I bought the game because I wanted a shoot-a-thon. I liked it for that:) - plus its one of the creepier games I've ever played - especially later on when they introduce those floating heads.

RTCW had the first truly decent teamplay factor since Tribes. Teamkillers were mostly just wasting their time, not being able to adversely effect the other players or the objectives, and hacks or "cheating" are relatively rare, unlike in most other multiplayer FPS'emups, such as CS.

20 -- Rise of Nations. It was ok. I really liked the nukes.19 -- Halo. WTF? It was great on the XBOX but not a good FPS by PC standards.18 -- Rom Total War.17 -- UT2k4. Why this version? All of them were really good. Sequels should be disqualified.16 -- MoH Allied Assault. It was ok. I really hated the way the game cutscened a lot. And the fact that it forced a tutorial sucked.15 -- NWN. Great game and very modable. Still play this after, what, 5 years.14 -- Max Payne. Loved bullet time.13 -- C&C Generals. Never played it.12 -- Guild Wars. MMO without fees. Awesome.11 -- Civ4. After Civ3, I was really not willing to buy another Civ game. I still play Alpha Centuari though.10 -- Warcraft 3. Not a big fan of RTS. Never tried it.9 -- Doom3. Never played it. Too dark. Duct tape mod really showed how dumb game designers are. And WTF with batteries that last 10 seconds?8 -- FEAR. Stupid name but great game. The demo gave away almost all the scary parts though. Bullet time and the nail gun was awesome.7 -- Company of Heroes. Very fun for a RTS. Still, never played it more than a few hours.6 -- BF1942. Played the shit out of this at LAN parties. Once Desert Combat was out, played the shit out of it again. The follow-ups sucked bad though.5 -- KOTOR. Another port from XBOX. It was fun. Loved the moddable lightsaber.4 -- Call of Duty. I was really burned out on WW2 games at this point. God, can we get another war?3 -- Oblivion. Something about a first-person RPG just sucks. After 10 minutes of not knowing where the last rat was, I gave up and uninstalled it.2 -- Half-Life 2. I guess it was OK. I only bought it because of CS:S1 -- WoW. This game is a lot of fun and very social. Most of my friends play this to extremes. Once I got high-level, I quit. I don't have time to do the same 6+ hour crawl 20 times to get the uber sword of pwnage. I really loved the fact that I get credit for *not* playing. Makes leveling much easier.

So, where was X2 or X3? Both were lots of fun. How about GalCiv or GalCiv2? Empire at War was a blast as was Hero Quest. Flight simulators (all sims really) were missing. GTR, Falcon Allied Force, Flight Sim X, LOMAC, and IL2 were a ton of fun. As was Silent Hunter 3. Realistic sims are, for me, what really keeps me updating my PC. Everything else can be duplicated on a console. The first time you complete the ramp start in Falcon, you'll know the PC is king.

How about the 6 day war? Haven't seen any games on that one. Play as the arab alliance, see if you can win.

Or what about Gulf War II? Starts out as a war game, morphs into a military/city strategy game. A cross between command and conquer and simcity2000. See if you can stabilize Iraq before it can happen in real life.

Falcon Allied Force was about the first Bosnia invasion. Circa 1995. They got the title wrong, but whatever. These have been several GW2 games. A few flight sims and several shooters. None of them were any good. I'd love to see something like a driving sim in a humvee throu

The Vista era was good, but nothing compared to the Windows 98 era (though I don't know that using OSes as a quantitative factor for determining gaming eras is particularly valid). I'll stack up Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Grim Fandango against the best games from *any* era.

I don't think that C&C gets enough recognition in the RTS genre. It's my favourite series, and I really don't get why more people don't like like it. My biggest problem with most of the other ones are too many resources. In C&C you had tiberium, and that's all you had to collect. In Warcraft 2, you had wood, gold, and oil, and you need varying amounts of each for building units. Then there's games like starcraft where you have to constantly click around your base figuring out which buidlings you can finally upgrade, and which ones you can start doing research on. On C&C everything could be controlled on the right hand part of your screen. No reason to click on your barracks to build a soldier, or you factory to build a jeep.

Having to coordinate different resources is the *point*. Having only one resource is too simplistic. As far clicking on buildings are concerned, I don't like clicking on the map or on the menu; both are too slow. If I had my druthers for Starcraft, you'd have a hotkey to cycle through buildings, or better, several hotkeys to cycle though different classes of buildings.

Yah, I know those are old games now, but damn I have had a lot of fun playing them. I enjoyed Space Rangers 2 also...I guess I enjoy RTS/RPG games. Call of Duty/COD2 were not bad, either, but I did not burn myself out on WWII games. I also noticed that Warhammer 40k is not included which is too bad, I thought that was a lot of fun. How much repeat playability/moddability does a game have to have to be considered a classic? Maybe to be fair to this list we can have a comprehensive list made that shows g

Best game of the XP generation: Nethack. And Windows ME, 2000, 98(SE), 3.1, MS-DOS, DRDOS, 4DOS, not to mention Macs, Unixes, Linuxes, WinCEs, Amigas, etc. And the only game that literally has survived a human generation - I remember playing it 20+ years ago for the first time. And I still do.

I like Nethack even though I suck at it, and would like to know which game design flaws/elements are you referring to? (Not saying that Nethack is flawless mind you. To be flawless it would have to be less frustrating)

It seems like with Windows, you can choose either crashes (9x) or viruses (nt/2k/xp). I much prefer crashes, especially since I only use Windows for games nowadays (when I have time).

Ahem.

XP is pretty good about not having viruses or worms if you apply the proper precautions, the first of which is turning on a firewall (default in SP2) and only opening ports when you absolutely have to. And if you don't download sketchy software or mount sketchy disks. I run XP semi-frequently directly on the public Interne

I should also point out that fixing every problem in a multi-million line piece of code is hard......I don't think that this has occurred to anyone on here.

Consumers don't care how hard it is, nor should they.

You try debugging an operating system with the complexity of Windows. When you can do it, then we'll take your complaints about Windows seriously.

If we could do it then microsoft would be out of business. They are a software company that sells an operating system. People pay them money for said OS, so they don't have to make their own. By your line of thinking we should all be doctors/mechanics/engineers/developers/etc before we can expect quality from others.

What the heck is the point of the premise of this article? Why in the world would you group games by what the latest version of Windows was when they were released? Unlike many Slashdotters, I'm not one to bitch about the job the editors do, but it seems to me that they were seriously trolled by these 20 pages of ads.

Far Cry allowed exploration and variation in moving around and solving scenarios. The latter two tried to be interactive movies, where story kept you from stepping outside the preset ride, sometimes in really ugly ways. They must be nice as a first FPS experience, but they're not about playing so much as shooting on que.

I finished HL2 w/ no cheats. I finished FarCry using cheats for the last couple of levels - I really wanted to play to the end. I'm not even halfway through Doom 3 and quit. I enjoyed the "spooky/scary" factor, but it got a bit dull. FarCry should have been in the top 20.

On a wild shot, because the games that are most innovative normally have some rough edges fixed in a sequel? Civilization 4 for example is an iterative development going all the way back to Civilization long, long time ago and while hardly revolutionary in any way it's a damn good and polished TBS game. I was tired of C&C Generals before it even got out, but I know it was better than the C&Cs I played. Warcraft III was also a really well made game. Loved Oblivion, except it brought my hardware to it

Most video games do, particularly high-budget games which are likely to win awards. It's difficult to add depth to puzzle/card/city-builder games (though there have been some notable exceptions), so most high-budget games are those which simulate "reality" (either our world or a fantasy world). Once you've done that, the question becomes: what do you do in this dream world? The answer is simple: you do something you can't do in the real world. You fight an alien invasion, become a special agent, complete mythical quests, engage in futuristic arena combat, steal cars, or build an empire.

Non-violent games generally fall into a few categories: sports (Madden is one of the top selling games, year after year), racing (GT3 is the best selling PS2 game), card/casino (Hold 'Em is insanely popular online, and Solitare is the most distributed and played video game ever), builder/tycoon, and puzzle.

Sports games don't do well on PCs. They play better with controllers and on a big screen with friends. Racing games - ditto - few have a wheel, and no one wants to play a racing game with a keyboard. Card/casino and puzzle games are unlikely to make a Top 20 list (not that they are bad, they just aren't typically deep big-budget titles). As for builder/tycoon games, there have been some standout titles (Sim City, for one), but there hasn't been anything spectacular in the last 5 years - mostly just sequels and rehashes.

So, what does that leave? RTS, FPS, RPG, and MMO games. Guess what? They almost always involve at least a minimal amount of violence.

We did leave one insanely popular PC game out, though. The Sims is the best-selling PC title of all time, and it isn't really violent at all.

Allow me to name a few types of games that don't involve shooting and/or killing.- Sports: This includes about 80 hojillion subgenres like golf, tennis, football, the other football (I'll let the reader determine which they want to think is "the other" one), baseball, basketball, and many more, along with hybrid genre-hoppers like golf course builders and simulations, and more recently, there's been a coaching-only NFL-style football game. I guess you still "shoot" in a basketball game, though.

Don't forget MTA:SA Race and the upcoming MTA Deathmatch. I think when MTA:SA DM and when SA-MP 0.2 will come out (I think they'll both be released at about the same time, which should be no later than next summer) I think MTA will show more potential and quality than SA-MP. At least for now SA-MP is the only one that allows us to get out of our cars, in spite of its numerous bugs and it's advancement far under MTA DM's current betas (but hey, they're not releasing it until the editor's done..). About its b

MOH:AA is a truely excellent multiplayer game, no doubt about it. Shame hardly anyone plays it any more...Back in the day, you could log on and have a really excellent game. Plenty of people on there, good ping times etc. Now, there are far fewer players, and far more of them are part of a clan which means there is little chance of them working with you. I suppose that was one of the best elements. There are plenty of multiplayer shooters, but few managed to get people to co-operate in an ad-hock kind of wa

I'm finding something odd that 13 of the 20 'great' games are basically first person shooters and none of them are from small companies.

This is like a review of beverages that argues between coke and pepsi, or musical talent that's really concerned about whether Britney or Christina are better.

Not that some of these aren't good games, but he doesn't even show any variation in taste in the FPS games - he's got, what, four FPS's about "Let's go kill the aliens", and Thief or No one lives forever didn't make the list?

I'm sorry submitter, but your gene pool license has been revoked - you're no longer allowed to reproduce. Remember, just because we're making you eligible for a Darwin award doesn't mean it *has* to be fatal.

I'd have to add Battle for Middle-Earth to that list. It was Real-Time Strategy like so many others, but it was fun. The individual physics of each troop member made the excitement factor rise over pretty much all the others. A troll wading into a group of soldiers and swatting them away; cavalry riding over a troop of orcs, not just flattening them, but bouncing off the horses; the wings of the Nazgul blowing troops aside; and the Balrog exploding from the earth, tossing anything nearby away.It had true

The problem with those games is not gameplay. It's not graphics. It's not entertainment value. All those qualities were and are completely adequate to the awsome games that they are. The real problems with those games, and why new people don't hold them in the same awe is this: The don't play on new hardware. From hardware cycle timing to obsolete graphic modes, they just don't play the same as they did. God I wish we could have decent ports to current OS's.

Yeah, the graphics are nicer - but that's like putting a Dior suit on a 500 pound human. The colors and style are neat, but what's underneath can't run, can't jump, and one flight of stars will kill them. Oh, and for anyone who wants to criticize me - I'm 6 feet tall, weigh 250 pounds.

Offtopic I know, but kudos to you, I lost 23kg (or ~3.5 stone [or 49 pounds]) over the space of around 2 years, down from 93kg. Even if getting down to 230 doesn't happen as fast as you like, don't lose hope. It really is worth getting in shape, especially I would imagine for a father.

I woret he same rose tinted glasses for a long while, but after I tried a lot of the really great games I remembered from years ago, I have to say that most aren't that good. They were great then, but now they're not worth the effort.

There's still (as you say) some pure classics which can stand the test of time, but most of the games that you remember as good games, you'll be dissapointed to try out today..

Anyone with the dough to buy a system that can run Vista sensibly could use the same money to buy all three of the latest gen consoles, all of the big name titles for each of them, and enough takeaway for several weeks of gaming with the change.

Bull. I spend £600 on upgrading my current system a year ago, and it'll run Vista just fine. True, I "only" bought 2 250GB drives, Athlon X2 4400, motherboard, 7800GTX, 2GB of RAM and a 500W PSU, but for another £300 or so I could've thrown in case, monit

IME, while businesses continue their three-year upgrade policies because far too many CIOs remain too stupid/naive to question that policy, almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment. In fact, the only person I know who is considering getting new kit in the near future is me, and I have specific reasons for upgrading now that are entirely unconnected with Vista.

I was going to retort what about Guild Wars with a wikipedia link but...

Guild Wars shares many features with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). However, it was called a CORPG by its designers to emphasize the differences in its approach to online role-playing compared to other games in the MMORPG genre. Primarily, Guild Wars is one of only a few commercially produced and distributed online role-playing games to eschew subscription fees, instead off